Security and Privacy Issues in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

As technologies become more advanced and powerful each day, the progression towards embracing virtual reality environments in our daily activities become more real, and subsequently, the boundaries between virtual and physical worlds become ever blurrier. Living in the era of COVID-19 pandemic, human everyday activities are continuously fueled toward different types of virtual environments – from education, work, and even major life activities such as exercising, gaming and other entertainment activities have virtual-related platforms built-in. However, as these technologies continue to mature and grow to keep-up with our changing world, newer privacy issues arise and growing awareness in privacy concerns increase. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) is embraced by many organizations including the ones which processes and store highly sensitive personal identifying information (PII) such as healthcare industries and most financial institutions – to briefly highlight this, Xvision Spine System is an FDA-approved augmented reality tool for spine surgery which incorporate patient’s CT data. In this paper we are going to analyze in detail, the privacy risks associated with engaging in the use of these newer virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) environments and applications, implication associated with these risks, current mitigating solutions – their benefits and challenges as well as potential newer solutions which can be implemented to increase privacy protection for the end users, especially the vulnerable members of any community such as old people and children